When we arrived in Munich, we explored the area around the train station. We had all our bags, but we were waiting for Astrid to get off of work so she could drive us back to her house in Germering. Astrid was my mom’s family’s exchange student when my mom was in college. I had never met her and I didn’t know too much about her, but I was excited to meet someone who was part of my family, if only for a year.

Guy, Astrid, and Justin

We had dinner with her at her house. Unfortunately, her husband was really sick and their son was resting so we didn’t get to meet either of them that night. After dinner, Astrid gave us some recommendations for things to do in Munich and then she brought out the photo album she had made of her year in the States. It was amazing! I looked through the entire thing, finding pictures of my parents and uncle and grandparents from when they were young. I really enjoyed hearing her stories about my grandparents. Talking with Astrid, I feel like I got a glimpse of a part of my family’s history that I was not familiar with. It was really special.

Thanksgiving 1993

Marriage

Super Cool Young Adults

Brrrr

My cousins! But babies!

The next morning, we grabbed a train to Marienplatz, a plaza in the middle of a large pedestrian-only area in central Munich. The main attraction in the square was the giant glockenspiel on top of the town hall. A couple times ago, the glockenspiel plays for fifteen minutes, accompanying an automated performance reenacting two scenes from Munich’s history, a joust and a dance. We arrived just as the glockenspiel was about to start, so we watched it. It’s cool, but if you’re in Munich on a tight schedule, I wouldn’t make it a priority to see it. 

Stained Glass in Town Hall

Glockenspiel

After the glockenspiel performance, we made our way to the Viktualienmarkt for lunch. We got a Leberkäse sandwich, on Astrid’s recommendation, at one of the many butcher shops in the open-air market. Leberkäse is a sort of meatloaf adjacent food. It was pretty good! To fill out the trio of German food along with meat and carbs, we both got Radlers (half beer, half lemonade) at the Biergarten in the middle of the market. In my opinion, Radlers taste about 50% better than normal beer, and lemonade about 100% better, but it was alright.

Biergarten

We didn’t bring any cash with us into Munich which was a mistake. The market had a bunch of cute little shops selling German food that we wanted to try. Unfortunately, they were all cash-only for anything under 10 euros. We briefly considered buying 10 euros worth of 60 cent pickles but decided against it. They looked really good though.

Church near Marienplatz

Church Organ

After lunch, we headed towards our next stop, the English Garden. On our way there, we passed a street performer playing some traditional Bavarian music. We stopped and applauded for him when we were ambushed by a man with a microphone and a camera team. Apparently, the street performer was first violin in the internationally renowned Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and they were doing a segment on how street music can beautify a city. We answered a few questions and then stayed and listened to the violinist. 

After starring on Bavarian television and then getting sidetracked by a luxury furniture store, we finally ended up at the English Garden, the Central Park of Munich. I could spend a day there, but unfortunately we only spent about an hour there. The garden is famous for its Eisbach wave. Unlike any wave I’ve seen, this one was permanently surfable. I’m not really sure how it worked, but it was very cool. A bunch of surfers in wetsuits took turns riding the wave and then they’d hop off and get out of the river a little downstream. The Eisbach is a man-made branch of the Isar river and while fast, was going considerably slower than the Aare when we were in Switzerland. The surfers were able to swim over to the side and hop out quite easily.

Next, we made our way to the Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) Musem. Now, I’m not much of a car enthusiast, but I enjoyed our visit. BMW has been making motorbikes, cars, and planes on and off for over a hundred years and it was cool to see the progression of car history.

Futuristic Car

Not Futuristic Car

The BMW museum is right across the street from the Olympic center from when Munich hosted the Olympics in 1972. The area was crowded with runners. After asking someone, we found out that there was a 5k for a bunch of German companies. Each one sent a few employees dressed up in company running merch. It was fun to see people representing the wide variety of companies in the region.

For dinner, we headed to the Hofbrauhaus, a very famous Bavarian eatery back near Marienplatz. The hundreds of tables were crowded with tourists and maybe a few locals, so we decided to eat across the street in another Bavarian restaurant. In the middle of the restaurant sat a group of musicians dressed in traditional Bavarian garb. After every song, they’d go back to their eating and drinking for a few minutes before they played another. Music really brightens up the world. 

Back at Astrid’s, we did our laundry and then hit the hay. The next morning, I got up early to have breakfast with Astrid’s son, Christian, and then we went to the train station to head to Berlin.

Originally, we had planned to spend some time in Prague in between Munich and Berlin, but we decided to split that time between Munich and Berlin instead. We heard that Prague is a “postcard city.” It’s beautiful, but every year, more and more tourists come to see it and it’s becoming overcrowded. We decided we would prefer to spend more time in the bigger cities instead, especially considering the long train ride to Prague.

On the train, we booked our hostel for the night. My second cousin twice removed lives in Berlin, and I was very excited to see her, but unfortunately, she tested positive for COVID the day before we arrived. Because of the late booking, Guy and I ended up in separate rooms. The hostel was very nice, but for some reason they kept assigning me to a bed that already had someone in it. I had to go back to the front desk three times before they gave me a key to room with an empty bed.

We spent the evening with Djim, a Dutch guy we met. We went to the Berlin Wall Memorial just before closing time and then followed that up with a mojito making class back at the hostel. It was quite fun. We met Ethan from Florida along with a couple other hostelers. Hostel events are generally a good way to meet people if you’re looking for people to hang out with. There are always plenty of solo travelers who are looking for groups. 

Around 8:30, I took a nap. I’m glad I did, because we didn’t get back until 5am that night. Where was I until 5am? Well, I was at the Kit Kat Club. If you think that name sounds familiar, maybe you’ve seen Cabaret, the musical set at a fictional Weimar-era Berlin club by the same name. Anyway, Kit Kat was very cool. We’d heard that it was very hard to get in, but on a Thursday night, we had no trouble. Kit Kat embodies the alternative night life in Berlin. It is unlike pretty much any other club in the world. They took our phones away at the door and I had a great time in the judgement free zone inside.

I spent a few hours dancing to the techno music and at 3am found myself on a couch talking American politics with a guy from California. It was nice that the club had different rooms so you didn’t have to constantly stay with the loud music. At 4am, people were still arriving and it felt like no one was leaving, but I was pretty tired and wanted to see Berlin the next day, so we hit the road, arriving back at the hostel as the sky slowly got brighter. Back at the hostel, only one of my six roommates had beat me to bed. 5am is just the beginning of the night in Berlin.

The next day, we did as many touristy things as we could pack in. Honestly, I wasn’t as impressed with Berlin’s selection for tourists as I was with other cities. We visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was very powerful, the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Mall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Berlin Cathedral among other things. After a day, there wasn’t much else I wanted to see, and maybe that’s me being uninformed, but I expected there to be more.

That night, I took another nap and then we took Bolt scooters to a bar where we met some of the people we’d met at Kit Kat the night before. They were from Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina and I had a great time speaking Spanish with them. It’s fun being in a bilingual environment where people switch in and out of different languages.

After the bar, we went to Tresor, another Berlin night club. This one was a more standard techno club and I loved it. I did not expect to vibe with the loud music and the strobe lights and the sweaty people packed into the fog filled basement. That’s not typically my thing, but when I closed my eyes, I felt like I could just chill out with the music and dance to my heart’s content. I really enjoy dancing and yet I don’t find myself doing it enough. While I don’t think that I will regularly attend techno clubs and dance for hours on end, I’m glad I did it once.

Entrance to Tresor

In the wee hours of the morning, still early according to the Berliners, I walked home with Djim. It’s fun talking to people during hours when you should definitely be asleep. It brings a different side out of people. 

Berlin Cathedral at Night

The next morning, we were planning on going to Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp an hour outside of Berlin. While I think this would have been a very powerful experience and is one I would like to have at some point in my life, we did not end up making it there. We got a late breakfast at the House of Small Wonder, an amazing Japanese fusion breakfast place that used to be a Jewish girls school, and we were having such a nice time and were in a such a great mood that we thought going to a concentration camp might be a dampener. We also didn’t have much time and we didn’t want to rush that experience. 

Breakfast

So, we spent a calm afternoon in Berlin, going to see the Trains to Life/Trains to Death sculpture outside of the train station that both served as a launching point for young Jewish kids to emigrate to England in the early 1930s and as the launching point for Auschwitz a few years later.

We stumbled upon a wood shop selling cute little ducks and then we wandered over to the main train station, our last stop in Berlin. Our train to Amsterdam was supposed to be six hours long but ended up taking seven, so we arrived after 11pm.

Adorable Wooden Ducks

You’ll hear about my adventures in that part of the world in my next blog. Bye for now!

- Justin Dunn